What is it about the American desert that makes novelists write like Old Testament prophets? That flamboyant predilection is most famously displayed by Cormac McCarthy in his 1985 novel, "Blood Meridian," in which Judge Holden leads a band of killers on a genocidal spree through Texas and Mexico as he orates about the workings of fate and conducts pseudo-biblical "rituals not yet inaugurated into any canon."
Susan Froderberg's debut, "Old Border Road" (Little, Brown, 292 pages, $23.99), has none of the gore of "Blood Meridian" but borrows plentifully from McCarthy's extravagant dialect. The language is a wild mixture of vaquero-cowboy Spanglish and the King James Bible—you'll find words like "pulverulence" and "sudorific," and one character says, without a shred of irony: "Lo, would you behold what has arrived?"
The character speaking most in "Old Border Road" is Katherine, a 17-year-old girl who, naïve and in love, has married a man called Son and gone to live with him on the Arizona border. Son, his mother, Rose, and his father (known only as Rose's Daddy) have a small ranch but make their money selling water from an aquifer beneath their land. Katherine is gradually initiated into this difficult and isolated world, learning the fine points not only of housekeeping and horseback-riding but also of living with a cheating husband. The taciturn Son—a man "without enterprise or aim," Katherine soon discovers—is openly catting around with the daughter of a neighboring water baron.
A terrible drought that settles over the land intensifies Katherine's troubles. The scarcity of surface water is a boon to aquifer-tappers, but amid newfound wealth the family is beset by a series of disasters.
Ms. Froderberg superbly draws on the Sonora Desert's singular features to highlight Katherine's changing emotions. Her joyful honeymoon is set in a mountain lush with "blue spruce, dwarf cedar, juniper"; but her marriage deteriorates as the heat wave "drives desert rodents and millipedes to hole in the earth, singes wings of monarchs, silences chickadees, sends cacti into dormancy, has every animal panting."
Not all the writing in "Old Border Road" is as vivid as this, and often Ms. Froderberg is lured into distracting excesses of the Southwest gothic style. We're left to guess, for instance, what it means that a man has his "camelhair jacket shoggling over the cantle of the saddle." The story is also not served well by a subplot about Katherine and an oracular clergyman ("I'm here as your teacher. I'm here as your guide," Padre says), which rehashes one of the soggier conventions of romantic Westerns. But mostly this stark and convincing portrait of Katherine's maturity from a "lovestruck girl" to a self-reliant woman is captured in a splendor of naturalistic detail.
Katherine's coming-of-age story is given additional dimensions by the background drama of the drought and the need to provide water to an expanding desert population. Son's father is a sympathetic patriarch, but in plundering his property for its water, he is guilty of a kind of infidelity to the earth. By violating the settlers' fragile compact with the land, he is as faithless, in his way, as Son is to Katherine. The hard lesson of "Old Border Road" is that there are endless enticements that lead men to dishonor. "What do you think, Girl, are we truly our brother's keeper?" Rose's Daddy ruefully asks Katherine, knowing it not to be so. "Or do we do what a man does best, and just go out and get?"
Sam Meekings's mystical novel "Under Fishbone Clouds" (Thomas Dunne, 410 pages, $24.99) is narrated by a deity known as the Kitchen God, who has taken an interest in the inhabitants of mid-20th-century China because he is bored by the "usual miracles" of heaven. Dared by the mighty Jade Emperor to "fathom the workings of a single human heart," he follows the fortunes of an orphan named Hou Jinyi and his wife, Bian Yuying, in order to discern the secret of their enduring love.
Mr. Meekings carries Jinyi and Yuying's marriage through the trials of the Japanese occupation of China and Mao's Cultural Revolution all the way to the present day. But instead of a rigorous historical backdrop he offers bowdlerized folk legends and the soft magic of serendipity. That early note of boredom echoes throughout "Under Fishbone Clouds," which is filled with the usual tragedies, the usual consolations and, because our storyteller is a deity, the usual nuggets of wisdom: "History does not always turn out as you expect," for instance, and "life is a journey, and we are carried along like uprooted waterweeds." No advice, alas, about what to do if you get a fishbone stuck in your throat.